Who won the first Question Time of 2023? Not PM Chris Hipkins or National leader Christopher Luxon

OPINION:

If the first wrestling of the Opposition parties versus Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in Question Time was a gotcha contest, then Act leader David Seymour and Finance Minister Grant Robertson won it hands down – even if Seymour didn’t know it at the time.

Hipkins faced his first question from Green Party co-leader James Shaw – whether Hipkins would follow the lead of previous governments who put climate change on the back burner to focus on the here and now of a disaster.

Hipkins began by noting that he did not intend to give a running commentary on previous governments – getting a sceptical laugh from the National Party benches, who had been subjected to many diatribes about the ills of previous National governments from Hipkins.

“That’s nice,” Chris Bishop said, and Hipkins added “well, except when I want to.”

Two questions later, he very much wanted to.

National’s leader Christopher Luxon took up the questioning.

He started off with levels of Government spending, and then moved onto the amount spent on consultants. It was here Hipkins decided to extoll the sins of former National governments – saying capital spending was “something the last government woefully under-invested in, which is why we had classrooms that were falling down, hospitals with excrement in the walls, and roads that were full of potholes.”

Otherwise Luxon took him through the usual topics – the amounts “wasted” on projects which were then scrapped, such as the Auckland cycle bridge and the RNZ/TVNZ merger, followed by a musing about whether Labour under Hipkins was the same as under Ardern and wouldn’t “get things done”.

All of that easily handled or brushed off by Hipkins, who simply pointed out that for all of Luxon’s banging on about wanting to get things done, “he doesn’t seem to have too many ideas about what it is he actually wants to get done”.

It was a peppy enough exchange but also predictable and so neither really emerged triumphant.

Prime Minister Chris Hipkins in Question Time. Photo / Jed Bradley

Next up was Act leader Seymour, whose strategy was to bamboozle the new Prime Minister with numbers.

It worked. Hipkins was left a bit red-faced that he did not know a rather key number on the Government’s books – how much tax the Government was forecast to collect this year.

He tried to bat it away by saying he had not memorised the whole Budget.

Seymour then put to him that the Government was now taxing $118 billion off New Zealanders—$32 billion more per year than four years ago

Hipkins’ counter to that was what handed Seymour the win: the claim the Government was now taking less tax as a proportion of the economy than in 2017.

It was wrong – but it transpired that Seymour also had not memorised the Budget and so did not realise it at the time.

So Hipkins is now faced with having to make a correction to his answer when he next goes to Parliament.

The more fortifying exchange of the day was between Finance Minister Grant Robertson and National’s finance spokeswoman Nicola Willis.

Willis was hell bent on getting Robertson to admit Labour was about to hit the voters with a special flood tax to help pay for the cost of the cyclone recovery.

Fair game to her, it is something Robertson will not rule out as he waits to find out how much it is going to cost - and works out how to pay for it.

So Willis merrily reminded Robertson of his 2021 promise that Labour would not introduce any new taxes this term.

In reply, Robertson emerged with a paper to former Finance Minister Bill English in March 2011, as the then National government responded to the Christchurch earthquakes.

That paper noted English too had asked for advice on options to fund the recovery “including a dedicated earthquake levy”.

As some sage should once have said, a wise person goes into battle armed with the words of their enemies’ forefathers.